Back in 2010, rumors heavily swirled that Paul Heyman would be coming to TNA wrestling. In fact, Dixie Carter announced that a big surprise was set to take place at Slammiversary.
Speculation was that Paul Heyman was going to be the big surprise, however, a deal between Carter and Heyman never materialized and Heyman made it clear that he no longer had interest in going to TNA Impact after their failed negotiations.
We’re now getting a clearer picture on who truly wanted Heyman in the company and one of his demands.
On the most recent edition of Wrestling Observer Radio, host Dave Meltzer elaborated on Spike TV really wanting to land a deal with Paul Heyman despite a rocky past shared between the two sides.
“Spike TV really wanted it bad,” explained Meltzer. “Even though Heyman and Spike, when [Spike was] The National Network, they had a lot of problems, and he made Spike out to be the enemy and things like that for his own storylines. And they probably weren’t happy with that, but at the same time I think that they knew Paul was smarter than most, and probably would do well as the head of creative.”
Meltzer also revealed how close Heyman was to actually signing with Impact, and shed light on one of the big factors which contributed to the negotiations breaking down.
“It was close enough to where Dixie Carter really believed [Heyman] was gonna come”, said Meltzer. “In his mind, he had his certain things that he wanted. The key one, that I remember him saying, was that he basically went to Dixie and was like, ‘alright, of all the guys you have under [the age of]40, we’re gonna keep one, and you can pick because I don’t care which one you keep, but I only want one’. At that point, things looked bad because Dixie didn’t understand why he would say that.”
Back in 2015, Dixie Carter spoke with Sports Illustrated and offered her take on why TNA was unable to sign Heyman:
“I’m a big Paul Heyman fan. We met that one time, and I would have loved to have found a way to bring him in. But what Paul did for ECW could not be created for us today. In this litigious world we live in, that stuff could never be recreated.
You can’t go back and recreate things. I’ve had the biggest names work for us, and it’s just shown me that there’s no magic bullet. So we’re learning from our mistakes from the past and how can we be different and move forward.”